BREATHE asthma trial: final recruitment target in sight

The Southampton BREATHE (which stands for Breathing REtraining for Asthma Trial of Home Exercises) trial is funded by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment scheme. Since May 2013 we have been recruiting adults with asthma through GP Practices in Hampshire and Dorset.

Recruitment – To date we have recruited 607 people. Our original target number was 585 participants – which we reached last month – but our Data Monitoring Committee have advised that we should aim to recruit an additional 60 participants over and above our original target. Good news if you still want to take part!

This graph shows the number of participants who had entered the main trial by the end of November 2014. The blue sloping line was our original projected recruitment, the green line is our actual recruitment and the red sloping line represents our current projected recruitment to reach our new target of 645.

Current opportunities to take part: GP Practices that are currently recruiting to BREATHE are Regent’s Park Surgery (Southampton) and Ramillies Surgery (Southsea) so if you are a patient registered with one of these GP surgeries and you have asthma, we very much hope you will consider volunteering to take part.

We hope to be recruiting from Highlands Practice (Fareham), Adelaide Health Centre (Southampton) and Highcliffe Medical Centre in the near future.

A selection of adults with asthma from all these Practices will be receiving letters explaining how you can take part in our trial.

We continue to be hugely impressed and gratified by the enthusiastic take-up for this trial. In an earlier post I speculated on some of the reasons for our recruitment success  – you can read all about these here.

More information about what breathing retraining for asthma involves can be found here. You can also read about what some people with asthma think about breathing retraining in an article we have recently published here. The full protocol for the BREATHE trial can be found here.